Thanks to everyone who came to my DDDNorth session ‘Automated Build Is Not The End Of The Story’, the links to the tools I discussed are as follows Visual Studio Lab Management MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd997438.aspx ALM Rangers best practice guidance http://vsarlabman.codeplex.com/ Building …

Black Marble is a supporting DDD North - the premier Developer Community event running in the North of England. Taking place at the University of Sunderland on Saturday 12 October, it has 400+ attendees, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors converging to hear their peers talk technical. Always free, thanks in the main to …

Whilst upgrading a TFS 2010 server to 2012 I had a problem that a build was showing in the queue as active after the upgrade. This build was queued in January, 10 months ago, so should have finished a long long time ago. This build had the effect that it blocked any newly queued builds, but the old build did not appear …

I have previously posted about when TFS build controllers don’t start properly. Well I saw the same problem today whilst upgrading a TFS 2010 server to TFS 2012.3. The client did not want to immediately upgrade their build processes and decided to keep their 2010 build VMs just pointing them at the updated server …

The arrival of the Kanban board in TFS 2012 Update 1 was a great addition. One thing that has bugged me and customers I visit with this feature has been the missing link, or rather the confusion around the View board link. Teams that run with Kanban would expect that the View board link would navigate them to the …

I had a surprise exchange of text messages last night with Andy Westgarth. Sadly, one of the people who was to speak in one of the first session slots has had to pull out. Andy did the thing all the best conference organisers do – he called his friends! As a result, Richard and myself will be presenting a session about …

One of the most useful features of Windows 8.1 for me is the native support for Miracast (which is compatible with Intel Widi) for connecting to a wireless projector or display. Being able to wander around with my tablet whilst speaking is really handy. Sadly, whilst this worked for a little while during the preview, …

DDD North 2013 is almost upon us and I hope you’re all converging on Sunderland for what should be a great for devs. I’ll be helping out during the day, and I will also be doing a short Grok Talk on how Generation 2 Virtual Machines in Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 are new, different and cool. Come along and heckle, why …

A quick tip, this one. I downloaded the latest firmware update to my Surface Pro this evening. It rebooted and promptly requested my bitlocker unlock code. I don’t keep those to hand – they’re stored in our Active Directory. Fortunately I had another laptop with DirectAccess so I could find the key. Be ready with your …

CPC who managed to send two resistor-capacitor balances for LED lights, which as about 1cm in size in a box as shown here Other than loads of that inflatable packing material there was a huge CPC catalogue, with the interesting sticker So an online electronics company, that provides free shipping (a really good thing …